Time out for a
Christmas MiracleYou may remember
Contra III: Alien Wars was bumped up a few places on the list after I caught a possible mistake on my own list. So here is what happened. I actually compiled my list just after the poll ended, way back when it was originally going to be a SNES list. Easy for me as there is a shelf in my house where all my SNES games have stayed since the 90s ( excluding
Earthbound,
Lethal Enforcers and
Mario Paint, all which came in oversized boxes and are instead in the closet. ) So, generating a list of my favorite games should have been easy, right? Except that I realized the shelf had a gap where a game was missing. Then it all came back to me. way back in 97 or 98, a friend had borrowed the game. A friend who had moved away years ago. So that was long gone. After taking stock of the remaining games, I was pretty damn sure the missing game was a Contra game. To make sure that a Contra game even came out on the SNES and not one of the other systems, I found a website that listed every SNES game ever made, along with screen grabs of each game. It listed one for the SNES called Super Contra, and it's screen grabs were of the game I remembered. So that was what I wrote on my list.
However, when I saw the entry for
Contra III: Alien Wars and the Youtube video was the game I remembered from the SNES, I began to realize I may have made a mistake. ( I have since found out that
Super Contra was the name import distributors gave to the Japanese version of the game, which came in a box that had no English lettering. Apparently it was released in Japan earlier than in the USA, and therefore the Japanese game ended up on American shelves of some stores for those willing to pay extra for import games that were not in English. Super Contra was either a poor translation of the Japanese title, or the working title for the impending American release, or just something the distributor made up.
Contra III actually makes little sense as it is at least the fourth game in the Contra series if you count the one made for Gameboy. ) According to Wikipedia, only one Contra game had been released for the SNES.
But I still wanted to be 100% sure that there were not two different Contra games. So I asked around to see if someone knew how to contact my missing friend. Maybe he would remember the title, or if I was very lucky, still had the game somewhere. I lucked out. Another of my old friends had just recently reconnected with him on Facebook. I found out that after 9-11, he decided to leave NYC, move out to Hollywood and do what he always wanted to do, get a job in showbusiness. He said he was able to get a few odd jobs working on a few movie sets, and even got some work playing extras in a couple of films. But he could not find any real work, and by 2009 was broke. He then moved to Georgia where most of his family had moved to and has been there since. As for the game. He remembered playing it, then putting it with the rest of his games. When he moved to Hollywood, his wife boxed all of his games and consoles in he same box. The box went to Hollywood with him where it was never opened, ended up with a lot of the rest of his stuff in a storage locker, and some of the contents of that locker were later shipped to Georgia, while some other boxes were abandoned. He had no idea what he still had from 2001, or if my game even ended up packed with his.
Then the next day I got word that he had checked his attic, found his box with video games, said he still had the Contra game, and confirmed the name was
Contra III: Alien Wars. He also asked for my current address so he could mail it back. And today I got it. It took less than 24 hours to get here, while the Amazon items I ordered Cyber Monday are still in transit. Best of all, he kept it in it's original box...
....and it still has all it's original contents....
except for the dust caked on it, it still looks as good as the day I bought it. And I was so sure the game was gone forever. I never expected to get it back, let alone still in mint condition. Now if only my damn controllers still worked.
Topic: List of Crap #107: Countdown to the Top 50ish Console Games of the 16-Bit Era! (Read 23500 times)